Trouble running specific maps

[determinism89]

Most maps that I happen to play dont give me any trouble at all; However, some maps that I play cause me to only see 1 frame every 5 seconds or so. When I look in my task menu and read the cpu usage, Im only at about 50% when running these maps. Is this a graphics issue?
I believe my graphics card is a "ATI Mobility RadeonÔäó X1400"

The maps that I have trouble with are:
All P.U.R.E. maps
Emain Macha
Charlie in the Hills

[hoijui]

uff!!
i have the same card!
though... becasue of driver problems, it is nearly unusable under linux, and on windows i get blue screens when playing spring (after 20 mins or so, sais the memory is broken or something).
i dont know about these cards.. i think i never tried them on this machine, but 50% CPU is a lot, it is not "only 50%". spring tries to keep the load at a maximum of 50%.. i do not know the details though.
i remeber once having had a problem like this, with a map that had a lot of featureson it.. special grass, a lot and big trees, mushrooms and such. it ran very slow.
i guess the best option is to minimize graphic settings or not play these maps. :/

[Beherith]

Kill grass settings.
Reduce trees a lot too.

[determinism89]

I tried running them at the bare minimum: grass all the way down, trees non-3d. No improvement at all.
I feel like there is something more profound that is causing a problem. Are there any major differences between these maps and for example: DSD, Tabula, Folsom Dam, Tangerine that anyone can point out?

[Argh]

Ok, I've done tests with determinism this evening, and we've determined:

1. The problem's with the map itself, not with P.U.R.E. or code.

The maps cause the same problems with BA as they do with P.U.R.E., and other maps (Emain Macha and others) cause these problems, too, and they don't have any Lua or whatever. And P.U.R.E. ran fine on Tabula / DSD.

2. The problem's not settings. We tried turning just about everything off, nothing worked. Even tried Atihacks.

3. The problem's not the skyboxes. Tried removing them, no good.

In short... it's a complete mystery to me thus far, other than being some fundamental issue with the SMF / SMT. He's seeing 70% CPU usage before anything even starts, yet he has a faster CPU, better graphics card (in theory) and twice as much RAM.

[Beherith]

Please post more maps that work and those that dont.

[Otherside]

the only thing those maps have in common are alot of features.

Specifically tree's. PURE maps are laggy on low spec machines cause of all the world builder feature's

Id suggest trying maps with alot of tree's

and trying maps with no tree's to see the performance impact

[Argh]

The guy playing the maps had far better hardware than I do. He should have been fine.

And he said that the game runs badly on the P.U.R.E. maps when playing BA too, which does not support World Builder at all. IOW, the P.U.R.E. maps can't be running badly because of "features", because if playing BA, there wouldn't be any "features" at all. In quotes, since I don't use Features.

So, whatever is going on is not specific to P.U.R.E., the game, in any way. And it's not skyboxes. And he had stuff like grass turned off. So whatever it is... it's something fundamentally wrong with the SMT/SMF, or a setting in the SMD that borks his hardware.

[manolo_]

Please post more maps that work and those that dont.

i got since the last update problems with Aquatic_Divide_TNM05-V2, the average fps is nearly 10-15 fps. on the other maps its all normal

(ati 9700 mobile, downgraded driver)

[jK]

My experience is that some maps eat a lot more memory than others.
I fixed it via an upgrade (768MB -> 1.5GB). You should also try to increase your swap/virtual memory.

[Argh]

The end-user that has these problems has 2GB of DDR2.

[jK]

2GB aren't enough depending on the OS and swap size

[Argh]

Really? But none of my maps are very big, by Spring standards. So, if he's playing BA, where's all this RAM getting used? Because it's surely not being used by the map. If that was the case, then I wouldn't be able to play my own creations, since I have only 1GB of RAM.

[KaiserJ]

the reason for the charlie / emain lag : something about the basic water setting. i get 1fps on both of those maps, but if i change my water to bumpwater, i can get about 15fps.

not sure about the pure maps, probably a memory issue, they always crash and burn for me

[Argh]

something about the basic water setting

I'll investigate that. But none of this should be causing bugs on this magnitude, and even unpacked, the P.U.R.E. maps are <20MB in size, so it's hard to see how that's RAM-related, unless there's a fairly serious bug in Spring.

This is really puzzling, though. The maps aren't huge, they aren't even huge on the hard-drive. And I'm not doing anything uber-special.

Maybe it's water settings, though (which would be hilarious, since only map even has any water at all). I'll blank all that out on one, see what happens when people run it with the defaults.

[determinism89]

Just tried bmp water for emain/charlie and it worked.
Unfortunately, trying bmp water for It Lives yielded negative results.

Apparently there is a different problem causing my pure maps to stall than was causing emain/charlie to stall.

[Argh]

Or there's something special in the water settings that's causing this, even though the map is voidwater...